Beyond the Brave New World - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Beyond the Brave New World
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The speed with which the West has embraced all things perverse makes Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World look almost quaint. The moral anomalies of the West have far surpassed his imagination. The intensely reverential reaction to Bruce Jenner’s narcissistic self-mutilation would probably have struck Huxley as too improbable for fiction.

Given all the fawning over Jenner for his delusional preening, one wouldn’t be surprised if President Obama places a phone call to the former Olympian to congratulate him for his “courage.” For now, Jenner will have to content himself with a tweet from one of Obama’s chief advisers, Valerie Jarrett, in which she said, “The brave choice to live as your authentic self is a powerful example to so many.” That bravery seems to consist of timing his claimed gender change to the exact moment it would generate the least amount of criticism and garner the highest ratings for his upcoming reality show.

Obama promised a fundamentally transformed America and he appears to have created one, judging by the almost universal praise Jenner has received. His Vanity Fair cover has generated such solemn headlines as: “We’re going to owe a lot to Caityln Jenner.”

The media treats transgender ideology as indisputably good and anyone who dares question it as abnormal. Neil Cavuto at Fox Business has been vilified for mildly ridiculing Jenner’s photo shoot. After indicating his distaste for the story, Cavuto called a guest, Charles Payne, “Charlene Payne,” and asked him, “What do you make of all that?” Payne laughed at Cavuto’s joke and said, “It’s the era that we’re living in.” Cavuto agreed: “Rome, final days.”

What would once have been considered a grotesque affront to God is now apparently too mainstream for even most Republican politicians to criticize. Obama has paid no political price for his aggressive promotion of the transgender ideology. Obama has touted it as one of the great “civil rights” issues of our time, used executive orders to enshrine transgender demands, prided himself on his “transgender appointees,” and signed transgender legislation, all with little to no criticism from Republicans. Such is the power of political correctness under Obama that a Republican like Rick Santorum has been quoted as saying of Bruce Jenner, “If he says he’s a woman, then he’s a woman. My responsibility as a human being is to love and accept everybody. Not to criticize people for who they are.”

The brainwashed language of nonjudgmentalism has largely driven common sense out of politics, and woe to the politician who refuses to frame his positions in properly PC terms. Mike Huckabee is now the subject of backlash for stating the obvious: that transgender ideology poses a threat to the welfare of children and parental rights.

“For those who do not think that we are under threat, simply recognize that the fact that we are now in city after city watching ordinances say that your 7-year-old daughter, if she goes into the restroom cannot be offended and you can’t be offended if she’s greeted there by a 42-year-old man who feels more like a woman than he does a man,” Huckabee has said.

In an authentically conservative party, all of the GOP’s candidates would be making such comments. But for many of them, “conservatism” has been reduced to conserving the status quo, which now includes the widespread acceptance of transgender ideology. Pols of both parties go to great lengths to avoid giving offense to voters, while accepting a lifestyle that gives offense to God, who established the two sexes immutably.

It is telling that the only societally acceptable criticism of Jenner’s transformation is that it isn’t radical enough. Some Leftists are arguing that his understanding of gender lacks imagination. It is good that he is adopting a new gender, they argue, but it should be more subversive than looking like Jessica Lange.

This criticism suggests the next phase of transgender ideology, which isn’t just to transcend one gender but to transcend both genders and any “stereotypes” attached to them. After all, if maleness and femaleness are just artificial cultural constructs, then true self-invention should require a transition to an amorphous state beyond genders. Who is to say that one’s “authentic self” has to be recognizably human at all? Perhaps Vanity Fair will one day let a fading celebrity pose as a surgically created centaur.

There aren’t many divine commandments and norms left to break, but the Left can be counted on to find them. Obama once spoke of a “new Declaration of Independence.” The old one declared independence from tyranny. Obama’s TransAmerica declares independence from God.

George Neumayr
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George Neumayr, a senior editor at The American Spectator, is author most recently of The Biden Deception: Moderate, Opportunist, or the Democrats' Crypto-Socialist?
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